issue_comments: 1065951744

Awesome, thanks @brandonrobertz !

The plugin is close, but looks like it only grabs remote metadata, is that right? Instead what I'm wanting is to grab metadata embedded in the attached databases. Rather than extending that plugin, at this point I've realized I need a lot more flexibility in metadata for my data model (esp around formatting cell values and custom file exports) so rather than extending that I'll continue working on a plugin specific to my app.

If I'm understanding your plugin code correctly, you query the db using the sync handle every time get_metdata is called, right? Won't this become a pretty big bottleneck if a hook into render_cell is trying to read metadata / plugin config?

Making the get_metadata async won't improve the situation by itself as only some of the code paths accessing metadata use that hook. The other paths use the internal metadata dict.

I agree -- because things like render_cell will potentially want to read metadata/config, get_metadata should really remain sync and lightweight, which we can do with something like the remote-metadata plugin that could also poll metadata tables in attached databases.

That leaves your app, where it sounds like you want changes made by the user in the browser in to be immediately reflected, rather than have to wait for the next metadata refresh. In this case I wonder if you could have your app make a sync write to the datasette object so the change would have the immediate effect, but then have a separate async polling mechanism to eventually write that change out to the database for long-term persistence. Then you'd have the best of both worlds, I think? But probably not worth the trouble if your use cases are small (and/or you're not reading metadata/config from tight loops like render_cell).